Business meetings are an important part of a corporate life. Numerous workflows, hardware solutions, software applications and online services have been developed to facilitate scheduling, preparations, conduct, information exchange and follow-up on business meetings, as well as distribution of accompanying business notes and documents. Nevertheless, achieving high productivity and efficiency of business meetings is still a challenging goal. On an average day, there are 17-20 million meetings in America; according to industry and academic research, people spend 20-40% (upper management is spending over 50%) of their time in meetings; however, by various estimates, meetings are only 44-50% efficient, while 25% of time in meetings is spent discussing irrelevant issues. In a recent survey of 1300 business leaders from Europe and North America, 25 to 50 percent of respondents questioned the efficiency of existing meeting systems. At the same time, 80% of survey participants identified technology advances as the number one factor for future increase in meeting productivity.
With the proliferation of multi-platform content management systems, such as the Evernote service and software offered by the Evernote Corporation of Redwood City, Calif., meeting related materials may be stored in a common or business-owned cloud and synchronized across multiple devices and individuals. Such storage, synchronization and usage are possible for both the pre-meeting materials that may even serve as a basis of instant presentations directly from entries of a content collection implemented in Evernote and for the meeting notes and follow-up materials.
In particular, handwritten notes remain a useful method of capturing and delivering information during business meetings and other scheduled events. Correspondingly, paper notebooks and pads, whiteboards, flip charts and other handwriting related media remain ubiquitous business items. The industry of traditional writing instruments, such as pen and paper notebook or dry erase markers and a whiteboard has recently seen notable developments of convenient and elegant solutions for the business markets; examples include Moleskine notebooks and ubiquitous Idea Paint whiteboard products.
Additionally, hundreds of millions of professionals are using camera-enabled and location aware smartphones, which combine features including organizer where schedule and contact info are always before the user, a time and location aware device, a communicator and a connected device capable of instant sharing of information, a data capturing instrument that may take a photo of handwritten notes or record an audio, and an information access device running a client software for a content management system. Advances in image recognition made photos and scans of handwritten notes taken on paper and on traditional whiteboards a searchable data format. In addition, advanced image pre-processing, such as the document camera feature of the Evernote solution, combined with easy manipulation and search in images, increases the attractiveness of an office workflow from paper/whiteboard—to smartphone camera photo—to content management system, which is broadly employed by Evernote users.
Notwithstanding the significant progress in building advanced technologies bridging document and handwritten solutions with content management systems, on the one hand, and with meeting workflows, on the other hand, major challenges remain. There is a notable discrepancy between business planning and scheduling (calendar and task planning processes) and meeting related notes and documents stored in content management systems and elsewhere. Paper notebooks lack differentiation between business and personal notes, although professionals routinely combine private memos and doodles with business notes during meetings. Sharing photos of business notes taken on paper of whiteboards lacks integration and well-defined process flow. Identification of materials relevant for a particular meeting, and seamless automatic or semi-automatic distribution of the materials to individuals and groups with a need to know also requires significant improvements.
Accordingly, it is desirable to develop a cohesive workflow between content management systems and planning/scheduling processes employed by a business, including exchange and sharing of meeting related documents of all types and, in particular, paper and whiteboard based handwritten notes and their photos taken with smartphone cameras.